Printer Settings

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One important part of your business process is getting orders to your fulfillment staff, and one of the most common ways we see it is via physical printer receipts. For physical receipts, KioskBuddy supports a variety of Star Micronics brand printer models. For a more electronic solution, we support email receipts as well as Fresh KDS for restaurant based businesses.

You can also send orders to a Square POS for printing instead of connecting directly to a printer in KioskBuddy. This is similar to how Square Online orders are printed if you're familiar with it. Check out this help article for the details.

How to connect your printer

When the app first starts up, it starts detecting any printers on its network or Bluetooth. See the Troubleshooting section for more info on detecting printers. A list of detected printers will be populated, which can be used to set up physical and electronic receipt printers. You can also follow the steps below:

Open the KioskBuddy app.
Ensure you are on the KioskBuddy Configuration Home Screen.
1. If you are in Kiosk Mode, exit out of Kiosk Mode.
2. If you are in KDS Mode, exit out of KDS Mode.
Scroll down and find the Optional: Select printers for receipts section, as seen below.
Tap the checkbox next to printers that you want to enable to print to, as seen below boxed in red. Usually, printers will show up here as soon as you start up the app, if they have not shown up yet, use the SEARCH FOR PRINTERS button to detect nearby printer devices.

Each detected printer will have a SETTINGS button next to it. You can use this button to open a dialog containing advanced printer configuration settings for each printer type. To learn more about all of the available printer settings, see the Printer Settings section below.

Verify your printer connection

To ensure that your printer is connected properly you can print a test receipt to your printers. Tap the PRINT TEST RECEIPTS button (see below in red). Tapping this button will print test receipts to all of the selected printers.

Troubleshooting Printers

For issues detecting printers, check out our help article dedicated to troubleshooting printer detection issues.

For issues with printers that show errors when attempting to print an order, check out our help article dedicated to troubleshooting printer connection issues.

Currently, only Star Micronics brand printers and Fresh KDS are supported. Send an email to support@kioskbuddy.app to expedite development if you use a different brand of printer.

Printer Settings

KioskBuddy has a wide range of printer settings to help set up your kiosk for your different use cases. Each detected printer will have a SETTINGS button next to it. You can use this button to open a dialog containing advanced printer configuration settings for each printer type. Here you can find settings such as adjusting font size, routing different categories to printers, and more!

Enable Printer

Use this checkbox to enable or disable your printer. If enabled, KioskBuddy will send orders to this printer.

Enable smart printing

This is a setting that's disabled by default. If it works effectively we'll be enabling it by default moving forward! Let us know how it goes for you at support@kioskbuddy.app.

Starting in v3 Build 184, we added a new Smart Printing setting, which makes KioskBuddy continuously retry print jobs in the background if it fails to print an order. You can try out this setting by pushing the SETTINGS button next to your desired printer like so:

Then select the checkbox for Enable smart printing in the settings popup that appears, as seen below in red. When this setting is enabled, KioskBuddy will continue to try to connect to the printer, so you may also want to consider disabling the printer error screen for the customer as well as lowering the printer retry count so that customers don't need to wait around as long.

Number of Retries

This is the number of times KioskBuddy will try to print to the printer before showing a printer error screen to the user.

Keep in mind, the higher number of retries, the longer the customer will see the "Printing" screen. Depending on your printer model, each attempt can be anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds, so you don't want to increase this too much.

Enable automatic checking of printer connection

Select this option to have KioskBuddy constantly check this printer's connection. If the printer cannot be reached, an error screen will show up on the kiosk, preventing the customer from checking out (see screenshot below).

This does not work on all printer models, test on your printer before leaving this option enabled.

Disable printer error screen for the customer

Select this option to have KioskBuddy hide the printer error screen that the customer sees if it's unable to send the order data to a printer.

In general, you'll want your customers to see if there's a printer error, otherwise the only way you'll know is if you check your email for printer error emails.

Number of Copies

Use this setting to configure the number of receipt copies to print.

Enable individual copies for each item in the cart

If you're a food and beverage based business, you may want to print receipts for each individual item. For example, if you're a cafe, you can print individual receipts for each drink as drink labels. Select this option to print an individual receipt for each item in the customer's cart.

Font Size

Use this setting to control the font size of the printer orders. You can choose either NORMAL or LARGE.

Automatically append order numbers

Select this option to add a unique order number to the receipt. The current number resets according to the total orders each day, at the current Square location.

Sort items by category name

Select this option to sort all items in an order by category name.

Useful for operations so that all items of similar type show up in the same section of the receipt.

Show date on receipt

Select this option to print the date on receipts made by the printer.

Show time on receipt

Select this option to print the time on receipts made by the printer.

Show device name

Device names are especially useful when you have multiple kiosk devices running at the same location to identify your different kiosks! By default, if you already have your device name set, it will be applied to any failed printout emails sent to your account. To add your device name to any printed receipts, you must enable this setting.

Useful for identifying which kiosk a receipt came from.

Select this option to print applied promo codes on receipts made by the printer.

Show Square Loyalty reward on receipt

Select this option to print the customer's redeemed Square Loyalty reward on the receipts made by the printer.

Show prices on receipt

Select this option to print prices on receipts made by the printer.

Show subtotal on receipt

Select this option to print the order's subtotal on receipts made by the printer.

Show taxes on receipt

Select this option to print the order's taxes on receipts made by the printer.

Show tips on receipt

Select this option to print the order's tips on receipts made by the printer.

Show total on receipt

Select this option to print the order's total on receipts made by the printer.

Show KioskBuddy text on receipt

Select this option to add 'KioskBuddy' text to printer receipts. For FreshKDS, 'via KioskBuddy' will be added to the order name.

Useful for identifying which orders are coming from a kiosk.

Custom Checkout Flow Steps

Use this section to print or hide specific custom checkout steps to this printer.

For example, for a kitchen printer, you may want to hide a customer's name and phone number. But for the kiosk printer, you would want to print the customer's name and phone number.

Route Categories

KioskBuddy allows you to route specific categories to different printers. For example, you can have all of your "food" items go to one printer and your "drink" items go to a different printer. All you need to do in this section is select categories you want to be printed to that printer and de-select categories that you don't want printed.